Email has assumed increasing importance in corporate and other environments wherein email communications are now used for almost every imaginable communication. While the ubiquity and take up of email has proven to be a boon to users, the sheer volume of email communications has offered many challenges to information technology departments and others who provide and maintain such services.
In particular, in many circumstances the volume of email at an installation exceeds the communications bandwidth and/or processing capacity of a single email server. In such circumstances, or in circumstances wherein it is desired to provide some redundancy for fault tolerance purposes, an installation may include multiple email servers, which are used within appropriate load balancing strategy, to process the total email load without exceeding the capacity of any one email server.
At the same time as providers of email services have had to deal with increasing volumes of email communication, they have also had to deal with evolving needs to control and/or regulate email communications. In particular, most email servers today include sets of policies, which must be enforced, routes, and/or services, such as aliases and groups, which must be implemented, as well as the ongoing need to administer email users' accounts.
The administration of email servers has become increasing complex and increasingly-time consuming and the burden of administrating such servers increases every time another email server is added to an installation.
Previous attempts to deal with this increasing complexity and effort have employed a dedicated email administration server (DEAS) wherein the email provider makes any necessary changes and/or administration inputs and the DEAS then propagates the changes and/or inputs to each email server it administrates. However, such approaches are less than ideal as the DEAS is a single point of failure in the email system and, even if regular backups are maintained for the DEAS, in the event of a crash or other failure of the DEAS an email service outage will occur while the most recent backup is restored and/or the hardware of the DEAS is repaired.
Further, the DEAS and/or email administrator must have a mechanism for ensuring that each administered email server has correctly received and processed any updates or changes input into the DEAS and this can be difficult to achieve when the number of administered email servers is high and/or updates or changes occur frequently.